Jamie Lloyd's staging of Richard III is unecessarily complicated, while Martin
Freeman feels like a boy sent to do a man's work, says Charles Spencer

There have been reports in the press that the young audience attracted to seeing Martin Freeman in Richard III have been “ruining” the show by applauding and cheering at inappropriate times. Everyone behaved themselves at the press performance, but there were moments when your reviewer was tempted to stand up and boo, much though I normally admire Freeman, and the show’s director, Jamie Lloyd.

This, however, is director’s theatre at its self-advertising worst, while Freeman gives a disappointingly underpowered performance as Richard, normally one of the most thrilling roles in Shakespeare.

The starting point, according to Lloyd, was a joke. The play famously begins with the line “Now is the winter of our discontent”. So why not set the action in the winter of discontent of 1978-9, when the nation almost buckled under the pressure of strikes and vile weather? I remember those troubled times well. I was standing on a picket line myself.

Another reference point was the earlier attempt by rogue elements in the security service to destabilise the Wilson Government, and the possibility of a coup d’état in which Lord Mountbatten would become interim prime minister.

Frankly Richard III, with its tangled back story of the Wars of the Roses, is complicated enough without inviting the audience to consider all these other elements.

The action is set throughout in a cramped 1970s committee room, complete with spider plants and electric typewriters, a mise-en-scène that seems particularly absurd in the battle scenes. When Richard declares “My Kingdom for a horse”, it is played as a moment of comedy rather than desperation. Meanwhile, many of the supporting characters, with their cheap suits and dodgy moustaches, look like the union leaders who used to pitch up at 10 Downing Street for beer and sandwiches.

As the evil Richard, Freeman seems frankly miscast. The great trick of the play is that Richard seduces the audience with his wit and panache, even as he leads us into a moral wasteland of cruel barbarity. Compared with the great Richards I have seen over the years – Antony Sher, Ian McKellen, Simon Russell Beale and Kevin Spacey – Freeman seems like a boy sent to do a man’s work.

There is a gaping hole where the charisma ought to be, and his seduction of Lady Anne, which is normally so creepily erotic, has hardly a spark of sex about it. Just as disappointingly, Freeman largely fails to capture the blackly comic humour of the character.

There are moments when one glimpses what might have been. In a departure from the text, we watch Richard strangling his Queen with a telephone cord, making horrible hog-like grunts as he does so. But for the most part this is a performance that suggests the banality of evil, and creepy thrills are in desperately short supply.

There are a couple of striking scenes in the production. The killing of Clarence, not in a butt of Malmsey but in a tank of live goldfish, is genuinely shocking, and there are strong performances from Jo Stone-Fewings as an oily Buckingham, Gina McKee as an anguished Queen Elizabeth whose sons are killed in the tower and Maggie Steed as mad Queen Margaret.

Nevertheless, this was one of those nights when I would far rather have been sitting at home watching a Sherlock box set, in which Freeman appears to far more rewarding effect.